Google App Engine Misfit Toys: Come to Jill

Thank You

Huh?

Google released App Engine less than a year ago (Radar post). It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google’s servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was free (within limits). It now supports 45,000 apps and those apps get over 100 million page views per month. Those pageviews were all free, but they had limits.

Only 100 million page views per month? Across 45,000(?) applications? Isn’t that something like 2222 page views per month per application (or 74 per day)? Is this the auto-scale platform we’ve been waiting for? (Please see update below.)

Google also announced pricing for App Engine. It is essentially in-line with Amazon’s Web Services pricing.

App Engine Running on Joyent

I was interested to understand what Google App Engine applications, all of them, running on Joyent Accelerators might cost. We currently have a customer that pushes 2 billion page views a month. That customer spends $60,000 per month or $0.00003 per page per month with Joyent. (Bandwidth and storage are bundled into the pricing.) This means the entire Google App Engine application portfolio, all 45,000 applications or 100 million page views, could run of Joyent for $3000 per month. Astonishing. Dear Google Operations: if you are spending more than $3000 per month running Google App Engine, please give us a call. We can save you some money. (Please see update below.)

These realities are layered on top of a closed, proprietary platform. Truly misfit.

Yes, Joyent is investing in a platform, based on Javascript (to begin with) that will compete with Google App Engine. It will be priced aggressively, will be completely open, and run on the same blazingly fast Joyent Accelerators serving up customers that need real (2 billion page view) performance.

Citizens of App Engine: come to Jill!

Update: the traffic for App Engine has been updated from 100 million pages per month to 100 million pages per day. So, if App Engine costs more than $90K/month to run…the offer remains the same.